Forest is the main body of the land ecosystem and plays an important role in global carbon cycle. Thus, the patterns and influencing factors of forest community structure have received widely attentions by many researchers, which could also provide key scientific guidance for forest management. As the main environmental factor, soil fertility could greatly drive forest community structure at local scale. However, previous studies often found different and even opposite effects of soil fertility on forest community structure, which indicated that some other factors could mediate soil fertility effects.

Recently, many experimental studies have found that soil microbes, especially mycorrhizal fungi, could also contribute to plant community structure and influence the diversity-biomass relationship by driving different processes under different soil conditions. However, most of these studies were conducted in grasslands and tropical forests, and less is known about the regulatory effects of mycorrhizal fungi on community structure in temperate forests.

Generally, there are more tree species associated with ectomycorrhizal fungi (EM) in temperate forests than in tropical forests, and given that EM trees often contend for soil resources with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) trees, thus the different distribution patterns between AM and EM trees along a local soil fertility gradient might be expected and have a potential to influence local forest community structure.

To reveal how the different spatial patterns of AM and EM trees along local soil fertility gradient contribute to community structure in temperate forests, Prof. WANG Xugao and Dr. MAO Zikun from Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, cooperating with scientists from Universidad del Rosario and University of California, examined the relationship among AM trees, EM trees, community diversity, and community biomass with soil fertility in a 25 ha temperate forest plot (CBS) in Changbai Mountain in Northeast China. The results show that AM trees perform a positive relationship while EM trees have a negative relationship with soil fertility. Interestingly, further results suggest the AM trees could greatly contribute to community diversity, while EM trees mainly affect biomass, thus the community diversity and biomass finally show opposite trends along soil fertility gradient in this temperate forest (Figure 1). These results explicitly highlight the joint effects of soil fertility and tree mycorrhizal associations on temperate forest community structure, and systematically elucidate, for the first time, the regulatory effects of tree mycorrhizal associations on forest community structure along soil fertility gradients (Figure 2).

This study was published in New Phytologist entitled “Tree mycorrhizal associations mediate soil fertility effects on forest community structure in a temperate forest”.

This study was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Natural Science Foundation of China.

Email: yueqian@iae.ac.cn

Publication Name: MAO Zikun et al.